Our Mission

A Foundation With Deep Roots

Theodore R. Johnson and his wife, Vivian Chesley Macleod Johnson, placed great faith in education as a means to help people improve their lives. This was based in part, on personal experience. Mr. Johnson worked his way through college and, after joining United Parcel Service in the early 1920s, obtained an MBA at night school. He rose to the position of Vice President of Labor Relations at UPS. He believed strongly in the company and bought shares at every opportunity.

Achieving great success, Mr. Johnson felt that he had been lucky in life and he wanted to use his wealth to help people who were less fortunate. Through the establishment of the Johnson Scholarship Foundation, Mr. and Mrs. Johnson sought to help future generations of deserving people obtain education.

Mr. Johnson died in 1993 and his son, Theodore R. Johnson, Jr., became the Foundation’s second President. Under his leadership, the Foundation made important advances in the areas of investment management, grant programs and governance. Aided by a public offering of UPS shares, the Foundation’s resources tripled between 1993 and 1999.

The increase in Foundation assets provided the opportunity for many new grant programs, which were created during the tenure of Mr. Johnson. Among the most notable of these are the Tribal College Entrepreneurship Scholarship Program and the MBA in American Indian Entrepreneurship, programs that exemplify the Foundation’s desire to assist deserving people and a belief in education as a means to help people to succeed in life

As Ted Johnson, Jr. and two other founding members of the Board retired in 2001, Malcolm Macleod, the nephew of Vivian Macleod Johnson, became the Foundation’s third President.

Core Values

Mandate

Our Foundation was created from the fruits of the free enterprise system, operating in a free and democratic society. We believe that the free market system is the best in the world, but we recognize that some people fail to benefit fully from the system through no fault of their own. It is these people that the Foundation seeks to assist. Particularly, our mandate is to serve the disabled and those people who are disadvantaged because of their social or economic circumstances.

Education

We have chosen education because we believe that it is the best means to empower people to become more independent and to participate more fully in the benefits of our society.

Strategy

Our responsibility is to execute the Foundation’s core education programs effectively and to develop new ones. We realize that our resources are limited and, in order to be most effective, we must concentrate our efforts. We must also constantly re-evaluate and improve our programming, and change or replace non-core programs when we find alternatives offering a better combination of value and effectiveness.

Programs

To maximize the impact of our new programs, we feel an obligation to do more than provide scholarship aid to needy individuals. We also seek to identify niche areas which may have been overlooked or under funded by other educational foundations. We seek ways to amplify the impact of our programs through cooperation with other organizations.

Partnership

We realize that our programs are, at best, a catalyst. The people we seek to assist and the organizations that serve them do the real work of change and are usually the best source of ideas for new program initiatives. We look to them to help us understand how to make our work more effective and, whenever we can usefully do so, we engage them as partners.

Risk Taking

Just as the free market system fosters progress through innovation, the Foundation hopes to employ innovative programs to achieve its goals. Cognizant of the fact that innovation always carries with it the risk of failure, we will proceed only after careful evaluation and will monitor our programs closely as they progress.

Stewardship

The Foundation is intended to be a perpetual body and it is our responsibility to improve it with each succeeding generation. We attempt to do this by creative programming, vigilant oversight of existing programs, and careful nurturing of our organization and its financial assets. The Foundation seeks to grow its assets over the long term by achieving at least an annual rate of return of 5% plus the annual inflation rate.

The Johnson Scholarship Foundation is a private Foundation. It does not make individual grants. All scholarships and grants are made through selected institutions. The Foundation’s support of these causes is delivered through a variety of scholarships and grant programs, which are described in this site.